Interesting. Personally I have a hard time seeing how anything that requires separate templates as being better than React. I never want to go back to that. There's hardly a need to query elements. The only time one does is when using non-react libraries or doing some animation logic. And so there's no state in the HTML, and no need to render HTML elements that aren't visible. Virtual DOM seems ok except I find looking at JSX to be much easier on the eyes than JavaScript.
There's no need to query elements with Aurelia either, and it also does not render anything that isn't visible. I only use Aurelia because that's what they were using when I got hired, but for my personal projects I use Virtual DOM.
React is just way too heavy for my needs and if I'm going to put markup in my JS files I might as well just use Hyperscript so it actually is javascript. By pairing virtual-dom with redux, my entire application's state, including how the UI currently looks, is held in one large immutable object which I just apply reducers to when I want to change the interface. React, and all the other modern front-end frameworks, still have to deal with state living in two places (in stores and in the DOM) whereas in my apps' state only lives in once place - the Redux store.
Don't get me wrong, React pushed front-end development forward in a big way, but a lot of cool stuff has come out of the woodwork in response to it that is definitely worth checking out. I'm more interested true functional-reactive web libraries than React. Cycle, Elm, Ohm, and Mercury are a few I would recommend checking out.
